Evening News Book

It must seem odd to him how you got punished for the minor infractions. A "time out" for talking back. No Popsicle for coming home late. No TV for breaking your sister's Busy Box. But for the major crimes, there was no punishment. How much "time out" for shooting your little sister?

Giselle thought she finally had it all together. She'd escaped from the Midwest to temperate southern California with her young son, Teddy. She'd married Dan Trias, the impassioned professor of her Thursday evening composition class at Cal Tech. Dan seemed the perfect man for her: handsome, literate, articulate. They had a baby -Trina- who bound the four of them together. They had become a family, inviolable. Or so she'd thought.

When Trina and Teddy are involved in a terrible accident, fault lines immediately appear, revealing them as a family divided. Dan's ability to communicate collapses in the face of the crisis, and Giselle finds herself pulled between her grieving husband and her shocked son. And as she struggles to piece her family back together, Giselle has to teach herself the hardest lesson a mother can learn: how to forgive your child the unforgivable.

Searing, illuminating, and, finally, redemptive, EVENING NEWS explores the fragile relationships in stepfamilies, the nature of the love between parents and their children - and what happens when the two collide.

"It's one thing to have the artist's gift of language and insight, which Marly Swick has in abundance. It's another thing to have the guts to use those gifts to approach some of the most difficult questions of modern society...Not only is Marly Swick a prodigiously talented artist, she also has remarkable courage." - Robert Olen Butlet